Long in LR: Arkansas not ‘win at all cost program’
For fans upset with the direction of the Arkansas football program, Jeff Long made it clear Monday at the Little Rock Touchdown Club that winning games isn’t the only goal.
Oh, he would like to win and he said repeatedly “it’s important,” but he made it clear that wasn’t all.
“Yes, winning is important,” he said. “Now contrast that if you’re a win-at-all-cost program which we’re not and I’ve said many, many times we’re not, then you don’t worry about the academics, you don’t worry about the conduct, you just win.
“And you know what? When I arrived here 10 years ago, that’s not what the leaders wanted at the time and certainly that’s certainly not what we’ve delivered.
“Yes, we want to win. Yes, it’s a priority. Yes, it eats us up from the inside that we don’t win more.”
So, apparently, for those fans that want to win the way the Razorbacks used to win, the problem starts at the top. Even above Long.
Based on what Long said Monday, the upper echelon wants Arkansas to be more like Vanderbilt than Alabama.
That’s not a knock on anybody. But apparently winning and losing football games is not as important as Long says it is. If it was, there wouldn’t be comments about not being a win-at-all-cost program.
There’s no way of knowing what Long’s expectations to the coaches are.
Is there a number of wins or is it, “do your best to get a few wins, keep ’em out of jail and make sure they go to class?”
We don’t know the answer to those questions. That’s between Long and the coaches and probably should be.
One thing is becoming clear, though: The rank-and-file fan base is not happy. Whether Long or the powers that be really care about that remains to be seen.
Naturally they’ll say they care, but those inside the athletic department and foundation have said privately for a few years the only things that really matter are “selling premium seats and ESPN.”
For Long, a former football coach, I’m sure the lack of wins and the way this program has fallen is not what he wants. He said it eats them up inside by not winning which means he and others may be in danger of an ulcer soon.
It’s only two games into the season. Like a lot of others I really, really want Bret Bielema to be wildly successful.
But I don’t think it’s going to happen. To make it really simple, Bielema’s offensive philosophy is playing 10 guys against 11 while most teams the Hogs play has 11 on 11. When your quarterback isn’t at least a threat to run, you’re handicapping yourself these days.
Pro style power offenses work when you have pro style offensive linemen and running backs, which Arkansas doesn’t appear to have many of. There have been a few guys drafted low by NFL teams, but not many are making it past a season or two.
The trend isn’t looking good and appears to be getting worse. The best Bielema team running the ball was his first one. Yes, the 2013 team that was 3-8 accounted for 58.4 percent of the offense by running.
It’s gone downhill since, falling to 53.7 percent in 2014, 42.4 percent in his best season of 2015 and to 38.3 percent in 2016.
By comparison, Bobby Petrino’s 11-win team of 2011 had 31.4 percent of the offensive yardage by running the ball. They TRIED to run the ball 46.6 percent of the time, but just weren’t that good at it.
Bielema’s teams have TRIED to run the ball progressively more and more. In 2013, it was just 56 percent of the time increasing each year to 61.2 percent.
It’s just flat not working for whatever reason. The running game has actually gotten worse each year if you look at the metrics.
There are still 10 games for it to improve.
But don’t look for any midseason firing. That’s not Long’s style. He does an “evaluation” at the end of every season.
It was the evaluation after the “almost orgasmic” win over Texas in the Texas Bowl that got him in the financial pickle he finds himself in now. The guess here is the excitement of beating a bad Longhorns team on the edge of chaos got everybody a little too pumped.
Long rolled the dice in January 2015. How they come up won’t be known for a bit longer.
But right now it looks more like snake-eyes than 7’s.
Will Bielema agree about not being ‘win-at-all-cost?’
Bret Bielema will be in front of the media Wednesday morning for the first time since a brief post-mortem following Arkansas’ loss to TCU last Saturday.
How he handles it will be the next news cycle.
But the guess here is he will avoid the mess Jeff Long created by dumping it all in the laps of the Board of Trustees.
When Long said “we are not a win-at-all-cost program,” it blew up on social media the websites.
HitThatLine.com had over 10,000 views of that single story in less than a day. Considering we just launched the site about 3 weeks ago, that’s pretty rapid growth considering there hasn’t been a lot of advertising bought.
Bielema could jump in with both feet, however. Let’s face it, that would not be totally out of character for him.
The only way he could win the fan base back before going to Arlington is say the not having an emphasis on winning hurts the football program. It has a trickle-down effect and does affect recruiting.
If you’re a top recruit you really interested in going somewhere that doesn’t consider winning that big of a deal? You can get that at several other places.
As I said, though, I doubt he will want to venture into those waters. He might come out and say he agrees with that philosophy, but that is either what he feels he has to say to keep his job or he truly agrees with it.
If it is the latter, the volume of discontent in the fan base will rise.
But it is the only way he can truly have a believable excuse for the mess this football program has become.
While some would content it’s not a mess, there is the argument to the contrary.
All offseason, Bielema kept repeating this was his fifth year and he knows that’s when the full responsibility of the program falls to him.
We were told since the start of fall camp how the offensive line was making improvement and the young wide receivers were going to be in great shape.
I didn’t believe it then after seeing a couple of scrimmages. Derek Ruscin and I began wondering if we were the only two people that saw an offensive line that was, at best, not an improvement over last year and often appeared to take a step back.
And I knew the receivers had a problem when they kept lining up offsides with officials telling them to get back. Then offsetting big catches with equally impressive drops.
Florida A&M, an FCS school that plays in a very weak league, pressured quarterback Austin Allen on numerous occasions. The Razorbacks had a big win because, well, their second and third teams are better than the Rattlers.
In the spin control after the TCU game, several in the media have projected the Horned Frogs as title contenders in the Big 12 along with Oklahoma.
No, they’re not. TCU will likely finish no higher than third in that league.
After wins and losses, coaches talk about how good the previous opponent was and how great the next one is.
Bielema won’t have the luxury of that second one at Wednesday’s press conference.
With an open date before the Texas A&M game, this one will be all about TCU and the status of this football team now.
Here’s a primer on what we’ll hear:
• The coaching staff has to self-assess everything they are doing.
• They will have asked if they are trying to get players to do things they can’t do. That’s coach-speak for we seriously over-estimated their talent.
• The players have had at least one meeting to address concerns about their play.
• They are working hard to be the most improved team in the country before playing the Aggies. One of the truisms in football is the most improvement a team makes is between the first and second games so this should be interesting.
• They are holding open tryouts at kicker. Bielema said after the TCU game you expect to get in a game what you see in practice, so there’s another trend that will have to be broken. At this point they’re going on by-guess and by-golly.
To summarize, the guess here is we’re going to get a great deal of coach-speak.
And, honestly, that’s probably the only thing he can do at this point.
Potential walk-on gets message across creatively
If nothing else, Arkansas coach Bret Bielema will have to give Samson Tamijani points for creativeness.
The UA student was in the stands when Cole Hedlund clanged a 20-yard field goal off the left upright Saturday against TCU.
A former kicker at an NAIA school, acting on a suggestion from his roommate, printed up 36 QR codes linking to a YouTube account of him kicking and put them at key places around the football offices.
Reader working for Arkansas parking enforcement noticed a QR code on Coach Bielema's—it goes to a walk-on kicker's ???? https://t.co/gRmJ1GnkKu pic.twitter.com/tSgzQLiooa
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) September 12, 2017
Our friend Andrew Hutchinson at Hawgs247.com tracked down Tamijani for their story:
“I don’t want fame or a statement,” Tamijani said. “I just want a chance from them going into the spring so they know I’m useful.
“The only eyes I wanted to see my stuff are the coaching staff. That’s all I’m trying to do.”
He was initially hesitant to speak with Hawgs247 because he didn’t make the QR codes for media attention and doesn’t want to hurt his chances of getting a shot with the team, but reluctantly agreed to share his story.
You can read the complete story here.
Apparently, cheating has gotten bigger than ever
For some of us that have covered the SEC in various states, we’ve heard the stories for years about amounts being paid.
Many scoff at the notion of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every athletic director tries to dismiss it as being silly and nobody admits their school does it.
But now word is starting to leak out on the day Ole Miss goes before the NCAA Infractions Committee, which is little more than a kangaroo court with it’s head in the sand.
Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com wrote Monday that the numbers are becoming staggering and now we have proof.
SBNation with Mississippi State linebacker Leo Lewis and the numbers are startling.
After going through the song and dance with the investigator with Lewis’ attorney clarifying things is when it got interesting.
Then Lewis started talking. About money. About free hotels, free rides to visit college campuses, hundred-dollar handshakes, free apparel, and even more money, bags of cash he says he received from multiple SEC programs totaling over $21,000 during the final week before National Signing Day in February 2015.
Apparently that is the tip of the iceberg as Lewis admitted he received $11,000 from Mississippi State.
Within the piece, Lewis’ mother Tina Henderson told a former Ole Miss assistant that LSU had offered $650,000 for the services of her son.
Dodds did some checking and apparently there is more than just smoke to the story:
And there is reason to believe $650,000 is close to the truth. I checked with the story’s author, Steven Godfrey, and he said confirmed the figure wasn’t a typo on his part or the person transcribing the testimony.
More than that, there is anecdotal and factual evidence of sizable six-figure payouts.
The father of former Texas A&M wide receiver Ricky Seals-Jones said he was offered $600,000 for the services of his son. That shocking information came from the fine reporting by authors Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict in their 2013 book “The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big Time Football.” One SEC and one ACC school, the father said, offered to double the offer the other school made for Seals-Jones.
The Ole Miss investigation, which started in 2012, has reached out there are allegations that may come out against many other SEC schools.
There is an entire group of former Ole Miss law students — now lawyers — that have been compiling information on other schools in and out of the SEC.
I’ve been told they are just waiting on the NCAA decision to come down and the documentation is real with proof.
And Dodd nailed it solidly by asking what a top quarterback is worth if linebackers are going for $650,000.
It’s scary to think that might be the going rate for any 18-year-old, who thanks to the sugar daddies, would have no problem changing a hundred but can’t change his own oil.
Too much, too often for the too young, it would seem. Nothing seems to have changed from the “glory days” of cheating in the 1980s except the zeroes at the end of the offer.
This is not to disparage LSU, Ole Miss or any other school that may have been named in the NCAA’s investigation. This is all about the Benjamins. It’s stunning a booster/school would go to such lengths.
While everyone wants to focus on wins and losses while the season is going on, we may have a bigger story brewing.
Much bigger.
Arkansas-Texas A&M an early kickoff in Arlington
FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas’ SEC opener against Texas A&M at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, September 23, will kick off at 11 a.m. on ESPN, the league office announced on Monday.
The showdown marks the fourth time in five seasons that Arkansas has opened SEC action with Texas A&M. That hasn’t been the greatest thing for the Razorbacks as they will be looking for their first win over the Aggies since 2011.
The Razorbacks will enter the game with a 1-1 record due to having a bye this week.
Arkansas has won its last three games after a bye, defeating Florida (2016), Auburn (2015) and LSU (2014).
